Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories (43 page)

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inter. Across from me, wearing a rather worn skunk-fur coat, sat a middle-aged man whose blond beard was shot with gray. We began to talk.

“You know,” he said to me, “a man is his own worst enemy, especially when there’s a woman involved—I mean a wife. I happen to be talking about myself. Just from looking at me, what would you take me for? A pretty average Jew, wouldn’t you say? You can’t tell by the shape of my nose if I’m rich, poor, or down-and-out. For all you know, I may once have had lots of money. And not just money, either—because what’s money, after all?—but a solid, respectable business, not one of your flash-in-the-pan operations that make a big hoo-ha while they last. No, sir! It happens to be my personal opinion that slowly but surely is best. Slowly but surely is how I built up my business, slowly but surely is how I watched it go
under, slowly but surely is how I paid off my debts, and slowly but surely is how I started all over again. If only God hadn’t gone and given me a wife … she isn’t traveling with me, so I can be frank with you. That is, at first glance she’s just a wife like any other, you wouldn’t guess there was anything the matter with her. She cuts a pretty imposing figure, in fact, because she’s twice as big as I am, and not at all bad-looking either—on the contrary, she’s downright pretty. And intelligent too; why, she’s sharp as a razor, she thinks exactly like a man … which is, you know, the first thing wrong with her, because it’s no good for a woman to want to wear the pants in a family. I don’t care how smart she is—the fact remains that when God Almighty created the world, He made Adam before He made Eve. Just try telling that to her, though. ‘Who God made before who,’ she says to me, ‘is His affair; that still doesn’t make it my fault if I have more brains in my small toe than you have in your whole fat skull’

“ ‘Just what do you mean by that?’ I ask.

“ ‘What I mean,’ she says, ‘is that it’s me who does all the thinking around here. Even when it comes to finding a high school for our son, I have to supply the brainpower.’

“ ‘Where does it say,’ I ask, ‘that our son has to go to high school? If he wants to be a scholar, who’s keeping him from being one at home?’

“ ‘I’ve told you a thousand times,’ she says, ‘that you can’t make me fly in the face of the whole world. And in today’s world, children go to high school.’

“ ‘If you ask my opinion,’ I say, ‘today’s world is crazy.’

“ ‘And you, I suppose,’ she says, ‘are the only sane one in it! A fine world it would be if everyone went by your opinions.’

“ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘they’re the only opinions I have.’

“ ‘All my enemies and friends’ enemies,’ she says, ‘should only have as much in their pockets as you have in your head!’

“ ‘It’s a black day in a man’s life,’ I say, ‘when a woman has to tell him how to run it!’

“ ‘And it’s a black day in a woman’s life,’ she says, ‘when she’s married to such a man!’

“Go argue with your own wife! Whatever you talk about, she’ll answer you off the wall; say one word to her, and she’ll come back at you with ten; try not saying anything, and she’ll begin to cry, or better yet, throw such a fit that you’ll wish you were never born.
In short, when the dust had settled, she had her way. Between you and me, why pretend? When she wants it, she gets it …

“Anyway, what can I tell you? A high school it was! And that meant, first of all, starting him in junior high school. You wouldn’t imagine that junior high school was such a big deal, would you? And especially not, I thought, with a whiz kid like mine who ran rings around them all in the rabbi’s schoolroom. Why, you could search all of Russia for another child like him! Granted, I’m his father; but the head on that boy’s shoulders is something else … Why drag it out, though? He applied for the entrance exams, and he took the entrance exams, and he failed the entrance exams. What was the problem? The problem was that he scored only
a two in arithmetic. Your child, I was told, has an insufficient mathematical background. I ask you, doesn’t that take the cake? You won’t find a head like his in all of Russia, and they’re talking about mathematical backgrounds! But failed is failed. I don’t have to tell you how down in the dumps I was; if he had to take the exams already, I would just as soon he had passed. But being a mere male of the species, I thought to myself: well, we did what we could—he isn’t the first Jew who won’t go to high school and he won’t be the last … A lot it helped to tell that to the wife, though. There was no getting it out of her head; the boy was going to high school if it killed her!

“ ‘Tell me,’ I said to her, ‘I only want you to be happy, but what do you need all this for? To keep the boy out of the army? But he’s an only son, he already has an exemption. To help him make a living? For that he needs high school like a hole in the head. What’s so terrible if he has to work in the store with me, or buy and sell like other Jews? And if, God forbid, it’s his bad luck to end up a rich businessman or a banker, we’ll manage to live with that too.’

“That was the approach I took with her. Did you ever try talking to a wall? ‘All right,’ she says, ‘it’s just as well. He can skip the first year of junior high school.’ ‘What does that mean?’ I say. ‘It means,’ she says, ‘that he’ll go straight into the second year.’ Well, the second year of junior high school is the second year of junior high school—but with a head you can search all of Russia for, who was I to worry if he hadn’t gotten into the first year? Listen to what happened, though: when the chips were down, the boy pulled a two again. Not in mathematics; this time the bad news
was something else. His spelling left a bit to be desired. That is, he knew how to spell, he just sometimes left out a few letters. As a matter of fact, he didn’t even leave them out, he just put them in the wrong places. I was crushed: how would the boy ever go with me to the fair in Poltava or Lodz if his spelling wasn’t letter-perfect? But if you think the wife didn’t turn the world upside down, you have another guess coming. Off she ran to the director to convince him that the boy really could do it; just give him a chance to take the exams over again! I’m afraid she made about as much of an impression as last winter’s snow. The boy had gotten a two and something else called a two-minus—go sue!

“Well, the wife made some scene. How could they refuse to retest him? ‘Look,’ I said to her, ‘that’s the way it is. What do you want me to do, kill myself? He’s not the first Jew and he won’t be the last …’ That just made her so mad, though, that she gave me a royal tongue-lashing as only a woman can. To tell you the truth, I didn’t hold it against her. And my heart went out to the little fellow too, you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Why, you’d think the sky had fallen in; everyone would be going around in blue blazers with silver buttons except him! ‘Stop being a little fool,’ I said to him. ‘Come to your senses! Was anyone ever born with a written guarantee that he’d get into high school? Someone has to stay home to mind the store, doesn’t he? Open admission is only in the army …’

“That ticked the wife off but good; she really laid into me this time. ‘I suppose that’s your idea of being comforting,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you save your words of wisdom for yourself? You’d be a lot kinder if you went and got him another tutor, a real Russian who can teach him Russian grammar.’

“Did you ever hear anything like it? The boy needed two whole private tutors; one tutor and one Hebrew teacher wasn’t enough for him! But when the dust had settled, she had her way again. When she wants it, she gets it …

“Anyway, what can I tell you? We took a new grammar tutor—and not some measly Jew either, God forbid, but an honest-to-goodness goy. The first-year grammar exam, you should know, is tougher than nails. It’s no picnic, your Russian grammar; you have to mind your p’s and q’s. Just don’t ask me what kind of goy God sent us, though, because I’m ashamed to have to say. The damned anti-Semite took a year off my life! He made fun of us to our faces,
he practically spat in them. For instance, when he had to pick a word for my son to practice ‘to eat’ on, all he could think of was ‘garlic’: ‘I eat garlic, you eat garlic, we eat garlic …’ He should only eat garlic in hell! If it hadn’t been for the wife, I would have grabbed him by the seat of his pants and thrown him and his Russian grammar through the window. That’s not how she saw it, though. Why take it personally? It was worth it, she said, just to get those p’s and q’s straight. Imagine, the boy had to go through that torture all winter—in fact, it was nearly summer before he was led to the slaughter again. This time, instead of two twos, he chalked up a four and a five. Glory be! Mazel tov, he’d done it! Or had he? Please to be patient, we wouldn’t know until August whether he’d gotten in or not. Why couldn’t we be told sooner? Go ask! Well, he wasn’t the first or last Jew who had to wait …

“Comes August, I see my wife’s on pins and needles. She makes the rounds of the director, the inspector, the inspector, the director. ‘Why are you running around like a chicken without a head?’ I ask. ‘What do you mean, why?’ she says. ‘What world do you live in? Haven’t you ever heard of the quota system?’ Wouldn’t you know she was right, too! The boy was turned down a third time. Would you like to know why? Because he didn’t have two fives. With two fives, they said, he might have made it.
Might
have made it—did you ever?! Well, I’ll spare you the details of what I had to put up with from the wife. But it was the boy I felt sorry for; he just laid his head on his pillow and cried and cried … The long and short of it was that we hired another tutor, a high school student himself, who was to coach him for the second year again—but this time by the intensive method, because your second year is no frolic; there’s not only mathematics and grammar, there’s geography, and penmanship, and the Devil only knows what. Not that I’d give two cents for the lot of it, to tell you the truth. A page of Talmud, if you ask me, takes more brains than all those subjects put together, and probably makes more sense too. But what could I do about it? He wasn’t the first or the last Jew …

“Anyway, he began a new regime. Up in the morning—hit the books! Time out for prayers and breakfast—back to the books! All day long—stick to the books! In the middle of the night you could still hear him jabbering, ‘Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative’—I tell you, it gave me an earache! Eating and sleeping, it goes without saying, were out of the question. ‘To take a human
being,’ I said, ‘and put him through all this for no good reason—why, I wouldn’t do it to a dog. It will make the boy sick in the end.’ ‘Why don’t you bite your tongue off!’ said my wife. Well, don’t think he didn’t go off to the wars and bring home a pair of straight fives! And why shouldn’t he have? You won’t find a head like his in all of Russia! All’s well that ends well, eh? Until the big day comes when all the names of the new students are posted on the wall of the school—all of them, that is, except my son’s. Was there ever a weeping and wailing! With a pair of straight fives, yet: why, it was cold-blooded murder! The wife ran here, the wife ran there, the wife ran everywhere. In fact, she ran herself ragged until she was told to stop wasting her time—or, to put it more bluntly, to beat it. That’s when she began to raise the roof at home. ‘You call yourself a father?’ she said. ‘Why, if you had a father’s heart you’d use your influence, you’d look for connections, you’d find some way to the director …’ There’s a woman who thinks on her feet for you, eh? ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘isn’t it enough for me to keep track of a thousand different dates and bills and order forms and memos and other headaches? Do you want me to ruin myself just because of your high school, which is coming out of my ears already?’ A man is only human, after all; push him too far and he explodes. Not that she didn’t have her way again. You see, when she wants it, she gets it …

“Anyway, what can I tell you? I used my influence, I looked for some way to the director—and I took some stiff guff in the process, because everybody wanted to know what I was doing and everybody was right. ‘Reb Aharon,’ they all said to me, ‘you have a nice little business, knock wood, and an only son to take into it—why go looking for trouble?’ Go tell them you have a wife at home who has the high school bug so bad that it’s high school, high school, high school all day long! Still, if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m no shrinking violet; with a bit of luck I found my way to the director. In fact, I walked right into Mr. High-and-Mighty’s office and laid it on the line—I can hold my own, praise God, with the best of them, the cat never got my tongue yet.
‘Chto vam ugodno?’
he asks me, offering me a seat.
‘Gospodin Direktor,’
I say,
‘my lyudi nye bogaty, no u nas,’
I say,
‘yest malenka sostoyanye i odin khoroshey, zametshatelene maltshik,’
I say,
‘katore,’
I say,
‘khotshet utshitsa. I ya,’
I say,
‘khotshu. Na moya zshena,’
I say, ‘
otshen khotshet.’ ‘Chto vam ugodno?’
he asks again. So I move a little closer and
repeat the whole spiel. ‘Look here, Professor,’ I say, ‘rich we’re not,’ I say, ‘but poor we’re not exactly either. And we have a boy at home,’ I say, ‘a fine youngster, who wants to go to school. And I want him to go too. And my wife,’ I say, ‘would give anything for him to go.’ I underlined that ‘anything’ to make sure he understood, but leave it to the dumb goy not to get it!
‘Tak chto-zhe vam ugodno?’
he asks for the third time, beginning to get good and annoyed. So I stick my hand in my pocket real slowly, and pull it out real slowly, and gave my little speech again real slowly too—only this time, while taking all day over the ‘anything,’ I put my hand into his … In a word—success at last! He finally got the point, took out his notebook, and asked me for my name, my son’s name, and the year we wanted to enroll him in. Now you’re talking, I thought—and out loud I said that the name was Katz, Aharon, and that the boy’s name was Moshe, though we all called him Moshke, and that the third year of junior high school would suit us just fine. He read it all back to me—Aharon Katz, Moshke Katz, the third year of junior high school—and told me to bring the boy for enrollment in January. How’s that for a change of tune, eh? A little grease helps turn the wheels, doesn’t it! The only problem was that January was still a long ways off. What could I do about it, though? If we had to wait, we’d wait. We weren’t the first or last Jews …